I'm generalizing for the benefit of brevity; referring to the most popular titles within that genre, but if we want to be anal, yes, each game has its own very specific load.

The GTX 980M and 970M are premium chips with an equal price and power use. The GTX 960M is the performance-mid area that allows price/power/performance blend due to current technology limitations. It's certainly not entry level; that would be 940/930/920 or Intel graphics.

Appreciated.

You can try to put higher-end chips in thin notebooks but then you get complaints of very hot surface temps, throttling or just plain overheating. Especially if you don't have AC at home (many countries dont) or live in a humid environment. If you live in Norway, well, buy Razer (for a ~30% higher price) :P

I have to agree that it is a real shame this laptop doesn't even have an option for the 970m. I can see the 960m running the full had model pretty well, but at 4k I believe the increase in horsepower would be borderline necessary... I wish it was atleast an option.

That is honestly the only thing holding this laptop back from being perfect and the best really portable laptop. Don't get me wrong, It's still better than the MSI 4k which has a crappy refresh rate, and in my opinion still slightly beats the razer blade mainly because of price, but also because the blade is only 14" for some reason and that really bothers me...

But because of this I'm still debating whether to purchase the G501, the Blade, or a 3k GS60, if I can find one with a 970m...

so putting aside the petty names, basically we all like the design (save for that one guy who is really disappointed there is a num pad... sorry),
the 960m isn't a bad chip, but it's probably not the best fit for the gamer market who are buying a 4K display like this laptop. This however is really not up to asus,
they are correct in choosing this chip because of heat and energy, it's still a great laptop and worth considering, and as they will eventually refresh this laptop in the coming year with a pascal GPU 1060m
or some such chip with the lower voltage and heat and higher outputs will make this laptop perfect for a lot of people. i look forward to seeing what happens to this laptop.

i'm not sure how fast the average laptop gamer cycles through laptops but I'm only on my second one (g75VW when it came out is my current).
so if possible can we keep this civil and learn as much as we can from asus instead of calling each other names (both sides here), everyone is entitled to choose whats best for them, and asus will make what they think is best for as many people as possible so they can turn a profit.

who knows what sort of surprises asus might throw into the refresh, or what the laptop will actually run, has anyone actaully got their hands on one of these laptops to try an overclock?

so putting aside the petty names, basically we all like the design (save for that one guy who is really disappointed there is a num pad... sorry),
the 960m isn't a bad chip, but it's probably not the best fit for the gamer market who are buying a 4K display like this laptop. This however is really not up to asus,
they are correct in choosing this chip because of heat and energy, it's still a great laptop and worth considering, and as they will eventually refresh this laptop in the coming year with a pascal GPU 1060m
or some such chip with the lower voltage and heat and higher outputs will make this laptop perfect for a lot of people. i look forward to seeing what happens to this laptop.

i'm not sure how fast the average laptop gamer cycles through laptops but I'm only on my second one (g75VW when it came out is my current).
so if possible can we keep this civil and learn as much as we can from asus instead of calling each other names (both sides here), everyone is entitled to choose whats best for them, and asus will make what they think is best for as many people as possible so they can turn a profit.

who knows what sort of surprises asus might throw into the refresh, or what the laptop will actually run, has anyone actaully got their hands on one of these laptops to try an overclock?

I would love to see a refresh of this laptop next year with Nvidia Pascal GPU and a Intel Skylake CPU.

When do you expect the G501s to ship with the new 5th generation Broadwell processors? I know intel is still dragging its feet with releasing the quadcore version of these processors. Or will Asus skip this all together and just wait to refresh with Skylake (whenever that will happen, I'm guessing sometime in 2016 with Intels slow track records...)